Abstract
In the current epistemological debate scientific models are not only considered as useful devices for explaining facts or discovering new entities, laws, and theories, but also rubricated under various new labels: from the classical ones, as abstract entities and idealizations, to the more recent, as fictions, surrogates, credible worlds, missing systems, make-believe, parables, functional, epistemic actions, revealing capacities. This article discusses these approaches showing some of their epistemological inadequacies, also taking advantage of recent results in cognitive science. I will substantiate my revision of epistemological fictionalism reframing the received idea of abstractness and ideality of models with the help of recent results related to the role of distributed cognition (common coding) and abductive cognition (manipulative).
The biological memory records, known as engrams, differ from the external symbols, or exograms, in most of their computational properties […]. The conscious mind is thus sandwiched between two systems of representation, one stored inside the head and the other outside […]. In this case, the conscious mind receives simultaneous displays from both working memory and the external memory field. Both displays remain distinct in the nervous system.
Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare. The Evolution of Human Consciousness, 2001.
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Notes
- 1.
In philosophical tradition visual perception was viewed very often like a kind of inference (Kant 1929; Fodor 1983; Gregory 1987; Josephson and Josephson 1994). On visual perception as model-based abduction cf. chapter five of my book (Magnani 2009); its semi-encapsulated character is illustrated in Raftopoulos (2001a, b, 2009).
- 2.
I have discussed this experiment in detail in Magnani (2012).
- 3.
On this issue cf. Bertolotti (2012).
- 4.
It has to be added that Suárez does not conflate scientific modeling with literary fictionalizing. He clearly distinguishes scientific fictions from other kinds of fictions—the scientific ones are constrained by both the logic of inference and, in particular, the requirement to fit in with the empirical domain (Suárez 2009, 2010)—in the framework of an envisaged compatibility of “scientific fiction'' with realism. This epistemological acknowledgment is not often present in other stronger followers of fictionalism.
- 5.
- 6.
Representational delegations are those cognitive acts that transform the natural environment in a cognitive one.
- 7.
The concept of cognitive niche is illustrated in detail in Odling-Smee et al. (2003). I adopted this interesting biologically oriented concept in my epistemological and cognitive research (Magnani 2009, Chap. 6), but also as an useful and synthetic theoretical tool able to clarify various puzzling problems of moral philosophy, (Magnani 2011, Chap. 4).
- 8.
An analysis of the differences between models in biology and physics and of the distinction between natural, concrete, and abstract models is illustrated in Rowbottom (2009); unfortunately, the author offers a description of abstract models that seems to me puzzling, and falls under some of the criticism I am illustrating in the present article.
- 9.
On the cognitive delegations to external artifacts see Magnani (2009, Chap. 3, Sect. 3.6). A useful description of how specific “formats” also matter in the case of external hypothetical models and representations, and of how they provide different affordances and inferential chances, is illustrated in Vorms (2010).
- 10.
See also Chandradekharan (2014).
- 11.
The detailed analysis of some seminal Peircean philosophical considerations concerning abduction, perception, inference, and instinct, which I consider are still important to current cognitive and epistemological research, is provided in Magnani (2009, Chap. 5).
- 12.
- 13.
“The basic argument for common coding is an adaptive one, where organisms are considered to be fundamentally action systems. In this view, sensory and cognitive systems evolved to support action, and they are therefore dynamically coupled to action systems in ways that help organisms act quickly and appropriately. Common coding, and the resultant replication of external movements in body coordinates, provides one form of highly efficient coupling. Since both biological and nonbiological movements are equally important to the organism, and the two movements interact in unpredictable ways, it is beneficial to replicate both types of movements in body coordinates, so that efficient responses can be generated” (Chandrasekharan 2009, p. 1069): in this quoted paper the reader can find a rich reference to the recent literature on embodied cognition and common coding.
- 14.
On the concept of multimodal abduction see Chap. 4 of Magnani (2009).
- 15.
Written natural languages are intertwined with iconic aspects too. Stjernfelt (2007) provides a full analysis of the role of icons and diagrams in Peircean philosophical and semiotic approach, also taking into account the Husserlian tradition of phenomenology.
- 16.
It is from this perspective that—for example—[sentential] syllogism and [model-based] perception are seen as rigorously intertwined. Consequently, there is no sharp contrast between the idea of cognition as perception and the idea of cognition as something that pertains to logic. Both aspects are inferential in themselves and fruit of sign activity. Taking the Peircean philosophical path we return to observations I always made when speaking of the case of abduction: cognition is basically multimodal.
- 17.
To confront critiques and suspects about the legitimacy of the new number \( dx \), Leibniz prudently conceded that \( dx \) can be considered a fiction, but a “well founded” one. The birth of non-standard analysis, an “alternative calculus” invented by Robinson (Robinson 1966), based on infinitesimal numbers in the spirit of Leibniz’s method, revealed that infinitesimals are not at all fictions, through an extension of the real numbers system \( {\mathbb{R}} \) to the system \( {\mathbb{R}}^{*} \) containing infinitesimals smaller in the absolute value than any positive real number.
- 18.
Myself I have already emphasized the importance of taking into account the dynamic aspects of science when criticizing the epistemology of models as “missing systems”: in the case of creative inferences the missing system is not, paradoxically, the one represented by the “model”, but instead the target system itself, still more or less largely unknown and un-schematized, which will instead appear as “known” in a new way only after the acceptation of the research process results Magnani (2012, pp. 21–24).
- 19.
I extendedly treated the relationship between cognition and violence in my Magnani (2011).
- 20.
I am deriving this expression from Thom (1988), who—in my opinion—relates “military intelligence” to the role played by language and cognition in the so-called coalition enforcement, that is at the level of their complementary effects in the affirmation of moralities and related conducts, and the consequent perpetration of possible violent punishments.
- 21.
Indeed, in the recent epistemological debate about fictions, even the whole “experimental systems” are reframed as “materialized fictional ‘worlds’” Rouse (2009, p. 51).
- 22.
Giere usefully notes that “Tolstoy did not intend to represent actual people except in general terms” and that, on the contrary, a “primary function [of models in science], of course, is to represent physical processes in the real world” (Giere 2007, p. 279).
- 23.
On the powerful and unifying analysis of inter-theory relationships, which involves the problem of misrepresenting models—and their substitution/adjustement—and of incompleteness of scientific representation, in terms of partial structural similarity, cf. Bueno and French (2011) and the classic (da Costa and French 2003).
- 24.
On the related problem of resemblance (similarity, isomorphism, homomorphism, etc.) in scientific modeling some preliminary comments are provided in Magnani (2012).
- 25.
This distinction parallels the one illustrated by Morrison between models which idealize (mirroring the target systems) and abstract models (more creative and finalized to establish new scientific intelligibility). On this issue cf. Magnani (2012).
- 26.
“In Sarsi [Lothario Sarsi of Siguenza is the pseudonym of the Jesuit Orazio Grassi, author of The Astronomical and Philosophical Balance. In The Assayer, Galileo weighs the astronomical views of Orazio Grassi about the nature of the comets, and finds them wanting (Galilei 1957, p. 231)]. I seem to discern the firm belief that in philosophizing one must support oneself upon the opinion of some celebrated author, as if our minds ought to remain completely sterile and barren unless wedded to the reasoning of some other person. Possibly he thinks that philosophy is a book of fiction by some writer, like the Iliad or Orlando Furioso, productions in which the least important thing is whether what is written there is true. Well, Sarsi, that is not how matters stand. Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth” (Galilei 1957, pp. 237–238).
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Acknowledgements
For the instructive criticisms and precedent discussions and correspondence that helped me to develop my critique of fictionalism, I am indebted and grateful to John Woods, Shahid Rahman, Alirio Rosales, Mauricio Suárez, and to my collaborators Tommaso Bertolotti and Selene Arfini.
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Magnani, L. (2016). Scientific Models Are Distributed and Never Abstract. In: Ippoliti, E., Sterpetti, F., Nickles, T. (eds) Models and Inferences in Science. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 25. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28163-6_13
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